This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Hack Will Change Your Life

Ever find yourself wishing there were more hours in a day? Chances are, you have, and on more than one occasion — we're all busy people, after all, and it can be hard to balance our ever-growing list of ongoing to-dos.

Well, early 20th-century public relations pioneer and business consultant Ivy Lee created an amazing productivity hack. As legend has it (and as Fast Company reports it), 98 years ago, Lee was called upon by powerful steel magnate Charles Schwab in 1918 to help Schwab and his employees increase their productivity. Lee agreed and asked Schwab to give him 15 minutes with each of the executives at his company, Bethlehem Steel.

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When Schwab asked how much Lee's advice would cost him, Lee responded: "Nothing — unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it's worth to you."

And so Lee met with each of Schwab's execs, sharing with each of them his five-step method for achieving maximum productivity. Fast Company reports that Lee's method went as follows:

At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.

Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.

When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.

Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.

Repeat this process every working day.

Sounds almost obnoxiously simple, right? But as it turns out, it was also surprisingly effective: After three months, Schwab was reportedly so satisfied with his executives' progress that he penned a $25,000 check (that's approximately $400,000 in today's money) for Lee.

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Sure, Lee's method was originally intended to help corporate executives get through the day, but we're willing to bet it would work just as well for the rest of us. Even science backs up Lee's claims that working on one task — and only one task — at a time is the way to get things done: As Mental Floss reports in its take on this century-old productivity hack, a number of psychological studies have proven multitasking to be pretty counterproductive.